We covered up our involvement in torture. Now we must expose it

In the autumn of 1990, in the immediate aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, British intelligence sought a special kind of permission from Downing Street. They wanted the prime minister to make it clear that they could, in defiance of international law, make use of information which they knew to have been acquired as a result of torture.

Margaret Thatcher, then in the last few weeks of her magnificent premiership, carefully considered this request. She consulted her conscience and pondered what was the right thing to do. Within a very short space of time, a clear and magisterial instruction was issued from Downing Street and dispatched around Whitehall: Mrs Thatcher wanted it known that the British state was not, in any circumstances, to make use of intelligence that might have come from victims of torture.

Thirteen years later, another prime minister, with a lower set of standards, ordered British troops to invade Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. As far as can be told, Tony Blair – who had unveiled an “ethical” foreign policy when he came to power in 1997 – felt few of the qualms that beset his predecessor.

Under his premiership, Mrs Thatcher’s wise and principled instruction was forgotten, and the British secret state seems, for a time, to have badly lost its way. As we know from the Butler inquiry, the Secret Intelligence Service abandoned its usual rigorous methods of intelligence gathering and assessment. Much worse, for a period during the past decade, both MI5 and MI6 became party to the perpetration of physical cruelty and punishments which were medieval in their sadism and barbarity.

It is important to be clear what they did not do. There is no evidence at all that British intelligence has been directly involved in any kind of physical abuse. Our chaps seem to have been too well-mannered. They would withdraw when the punishment sessions began, and only return after the last screams had died away.

Evidence of the latter behaviour, unfortunately, is very strong indeed. Let us take as an example the case of Zeeshan Siddiqui, a British citizen and suspected al‑Qaeda operative who was detained by Pakistani authorities in 2005. According to Human Rights Watch, Siddiqui “reported being repeatedly beaten, chained, injected with drugs and threatened with further torture and sexual abuse”. He says that British intelligence officers interviewed him while all this was going on, and that they can hardly have been unaware that he was being tortured.

Here is another example, also courtesy of Human Rights Watch. It concerns Salahuddin Amin, another British citizen, who was later found guilty of plotting attacks on British targets, including the Ministry of Sound nightclub (Amin continues to deny any part in the plot). According to Human Rights Watch, Amin was “repeatedly tortured by Pakistan’s notorious Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI) and forced into a laundry list of false confessions”.

While this was happening, claimed Amin, “he was met by British intelligence officials on almost half a dozen occasions”. Amin added that “he would be tortured, then forced back to his cell to do 'homework’, wherein he would provide a written confession at ISI instruction, then meet British interrogators the next day, who would ask questions on the same subjects. If the ISI felt his answers to the British agents were unsatisfactory, he would be told that he had embarrassed them 'in front of our friends’ and be punished with further torture.”

The case of Rangzieb Ahmed – exposed by David Davis, the Tory MP, using parliamentary privilege – shows a disturbingly similar pattern. “There is a dispute between Ahmed and British intelligence officers about exactly when his fingernails were removed,” noted Davis, “but an independent pathologist employed by the Crown Prosecution Service confirmed that it happened during the period when he was in Pakistani custody.”

The same pattern fits the now notorious torture of the terrorist suspect Binyam Mohamed, who was reportedly visited by an MI5 officer after being tortured in a Pakistan jail (later, he said, he was secretly transported to Morocco, where among other atrocities his penis was cut open with a scalpel). Mohamed, like all those mentioned above, may or may not have been a very bad man – I cannot say for certain, partly because the techniques apparently used to extract confessions badly cloud the truth. But his treatment shames Britain, which ought to be a stronghold of fairness and decency.

For a long time, the British government went out of its way to cover up its complicity with torture. It tried to suppress documents and made a series of misleading statements. David Miliband, the former foreign secretary, repeatedly refused to admit our involvement, a self-sacrificing decision because the worst abuses seem to have taken place well before he entered the Foreign Office. Unfortunately, David Cameron is now in danger of making the same mistake as Mr Miliband.

Shortly after last year’s election, Mr Cameron seemed to usher in a new era when, in a step which put his predecessor Gordon Brown to shame, he announced in Parliament a full-scale and judge-led inquiry that would get to the bottom of these terrible charges.

But there were doubts about the inquiry from the very beginning. The choice of Sir Peter Gibson, a 76-year-old retired judge, to lead the inquiry was particularly disturbing. Gibson had been the Intelligence Services Commissioner for the previous four years, charged with providing statutory oversight of MI5 and MI6.

During Sir Peter’s period as commissioner, many of the allegations about British complicity in torture had come to light. Yet did he ever ask tough and pertinent questions of intelligence bosses? His annual reports gave the security and intelligence services a clean bill of health.

If Sir Peter should have had any role at all in the inquiry, it would have been as a witness and not as an impartial inquisitor. Meanwhile, his fellow panellist Peter Riddell is a former political commentator for the Times, a cuddly establishment journalist who is not known for asking tough or probing questions. There is every reason to speculate that this was the reason for his appointment.

But the main reason for alarm concerns the terms of reference of the Gibson inquiry. It has stealthily emerged over the past few months that it will have no powers to compel witnesses to attend, while Sir Gus O’Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary, rather than the inquiry panel, will have the final say over what information is made public.

Worst of all, those who claim they were victims of torture will not be able to question MI5 and MI6 officers, and will therefore be unable to challenge evidence with which they disagree. This is the reason, above all, why lawyers for the alleged victims, as well as human rights groups such as Liberty, Reprieve and Amnesty International, yesterday announced that they will boycott the inquiry.

I am told that there were two principal reasons Margaret Thatcher was so strongly opposed to torture. The first was simply pragmatic: she understood that information extracted from terrified victims under duress could never be relied on or trusted.

But more importantly, she instinctively knew that complicity with torture was an affront to everything that Britain stands for – above all, our respect for tolerance, decency and the rule of law.

We still need to fight for these values, and our international reputation. So it is time to close the Gibson inquiry down and appoint a new and genuinely independent panel with serious powers to investigate and, if necessary, expose what appears to have been one of the most shameful episodes in the recent history of the British state.